@tec Your programming skills are FAR beyond what I can do. I started exploring voting options about 7 months ago, and seeing that IRV sometimes selects an outcome that is clearly not the best choice, it occurred to me that looking at the second choice of the ballots of the runner up made sense. That led to a sort of double-elimination approach. Using a spreadsheet to lay out a few scenarios, it appeared that the approach had some promise. Unable to find anyone to help me, I managed to create some php webpages that can be used to evaluate scenarios. Testing with that I found some anomalies so progressed to a hybrid approach. So far, it's checking out just fine.

I like the visual layout that you provided, and I haven't seen anything with the "indifference lines". It's similar to this: https://ncase.me/ballot/, which you're probably familiar with. I'd like to be able to start with ballot numbers and then have them displayed, rather than being limited to manipulating the image (which I think is fantastic too).

I was wondering too if your program calculates the distance between the two other options and then sets the second choice as the closest one.

Here's a link to the crude pages that I put together: https://wethepeople.ca/WTP_IRV-DEp1tester.php

I would definitely like to collaborate with you on an "evaluation framework".

Here is another good article

https://psephomancy.medium.com/a-majority-of-voters-1d990a53b089

@brozai I see, yes according to what I've learned about it QV tends to incorporate the strengths of interests and not just the proportion of people with those interests. Depending on what is desired that may be a good thing or a bad thing. There has also been research on its resistance to collusion and it seems to hold up very well, which is a property that I definitely like.

I found this presentation very interesting:

Youtube Video

One point brought up by an audience member during the Q&A was that QV seems to illuminate the relative preferences of the electorate, which show up in the presenter's data as approximate Gaussian distributions and the grouping together of different strata of right-wing and left-wing groups, which does not occur without the quadratic cost.

@marylander Thanks yup, this looks like a counterexample.

Using some of the ideas in your construction I found a slightly smaller one on 8 nodes

cd7a0a63-764a-466c-ab71-8fa9552bf2fb-image.png

Okay, so in my recent reading, I found a different result which sounds a lot more like the one I was hunting for here. The theorem is called the McKelvey–Schofield chaos theorem, the reference paper appears to be Intransitivities in multidimensional voting models and some implications for agenda control.

Anyway, for the statement of the theorem, I'll quote the Handbook of Social Choice and Welfare (Chap. 13, p.27):

Richard McKelvey has stated a famous theorem: Suppose the alternatives lie in an n-dimensional space (n > 1), we choose between alternatives by majority voting (as is standard in legislation), and there is no Condorcet winner. Given any two proposals, a and b, there exists a sequence of proposals, {a'_i}(i = 0, ..., n) such that a'_0 = a, a'_n = b, and a'_i defeats a'_{i+1} for all i = 0, ..., n−1. That is, by a suitably chosen agenda, any proposal can defeat any other if there is no Condorcet winner.

@SaraWolk @Jameson-Quinn Thank you for responding. I've emailed Sara about next steps, and I hope to hear back from you soon.

@jack-waugh I don’t follow.

@lime definitely, that’s a major problem with the agent based models, the choice of parameters can’t be validated without the data. A friend of mine is trying to work with ABMs for tumor microenvironments, which in a sense may not be too far off from what we’re trying to do lol

@toby-pereira Thanks for the feedback!

National elections generally take place several years apart and a lot can change in between, and so voters wouldn't be able to apply game theory in the same way as they would with multiple elections close together under the same conditions. And also I imagine people in the study are more likely to be "clued up" than the average member of the public.

One of my goals is looking towards what the long-run equalibria might be after people have figured out the system. So in this way I see that as a plus.

So that raises a question - with multiple elections, will it just be the same conditions each time just to see how the methods behave in these ideal conditions, or will certain variables change to make it more "realistic", or possibly you'd model both? Both would be interesting in their own ways.

In trying to set up the models one of my conclusions is that a "correct" set of parameters doesn't exist. I think instead of trying to make a study "correct" or "accurate" it would be more useful to search for robustness. A common result of repeated games is multiple Nash Equalibria. Another common result is sensitive Nash Equalibria. So if one number changes slightly a whole new set of equalibria might be optimal now. So I think it is important to vary conditions to see if an equilibrium is stable.

Reading on different strategies and failure conditions of voting systems you come across some really weird ones where it is technically optimal to do make some really weird decision. But that often requires very specific information. An important concept I came across while brushing up on my game theory is imperfect and incomplete information. When you change the information available it can sometimes change what the Nash Equilibrium strategy is. There's also an idea that a strategy might not be optimal over any specific set of game parameters but is optimal when you are unsure of the exact parameters. The more limited the information the simpler a game sometimes becomes.

@kaptain5 said in Professional Politicians skew towards altrusism? [study to read]:

In this study an interesting finding was that on average politicians we behaving altruistically (giving more to the other party than they would receive). On average over all sampled politicians were giving 49% of the prize to political opponents and giving 57% to in-group members. Compared to most other studies of the ultimatum game this is far above most people and very far above the rational expectation. The result is also remarkably consistent between countries. When the out-group and in-group results are combined this gives the result that the politicians surveyed are slightly altruistic in the game.
This one surprised me, I expected the politicians surveyed to be much more greedy.

I haven't properly read the paper but this bit is interesting, and I've been considering whether we should be surprised or not. Politicians certainly have a reputation for being greedy and corruptible. But a lot of people who go into politics probably do so for the right reasons - that they actually want to make things better for people and remove unfairness etc.

I think there is more corruption at the top, but this isn't most politicians. Plus I also think that higher-up politicians might still have some good principles, but these conflict with other things that get in the way of that - wanting to get in with the right people, make the right deals etc. So removed from politics, they still might make fair decisions. They just happen to be morally weak in certain ways.